Cory Morgan: The High Stakes of the Liberal Leadership Race

A Liberal Party of Canada logo is shown on a screen as a technician looks on during day one of the party's biennial convention in Montreal on Feb. 20, 2014. The Canadian Press/Graham Hughes

Commentary

On March 9, the Liberal Party of Canada will select a leader to become the country’s next prime minister. Fewer than 1 percent of Canadians will cast a ballot in the leadership race, as roughly 400,000 people registered to vote. It sounds undemocratic, but it’s the nature of Canada’s system in that parties select who will be the head of the government rather than voters at large.

With registration to vote in the contest being free and open to all Canadian citizens, the number of people taking advantage of the opportunity to vote is distressingly low.

The candidates have a short, tough campaign ahead of them. First, they must convince those who registered to vote that they are the best person for the job. Then the winner will probably have a very short period in office as the prime minister before facing Canadians in a general election.

Aside from being selected by such a relatively low number of people in the leadership race, the new Liberal leader will have the legitimacy of their role questioned due to the party system of leadership selection. The Liberals tightened the rules to ensure only Canadian citizens or permanent residents could participate in the process. Still, with membership being free through an online sign-up and open to anybody over the age of 14, the perception of abuse in the process could be high.

The Liberal Party changed its leadership selection process to one with free memberships in the 2013 leadership election. Of 300,000 people who signed up, 130,774 ultimately took the time to cast ballots, and they selected Justin Trudeau. Offering free memberships doesn’t ensure wider participation in these races. The Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership race of 2022 involved 675,000 party members who had to pay a $10 fee, and 64.5 percent turned out to vote. Having a fee for membership makes it more difficult to cheat and it appears to increase engagement among members.

The Liberal Party hasn’t announced exactly how it will verify the 400,000 registrants for the race, and it will be difficult for them to do so with such a short timeline. Activists online have indicated they have registered false personas and even house pets as Liberal voters. The party is presumably working to remove those fake registrants from the list, but the system makes it easy for opponents to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the next leader.

Voting system aside, the candidates for the leadership have a difficult balancing act to perform as they try to convince electors that while they are loyal supporters of the Liberal Party, they plan to take the party in a different direction. With public support for the Liberals being so low, candidates are forced to campaign against their own record.

Of the five candidates for the leadership, Mark Carney is the only one who hasn’t served as a Liberal MP. While he is using that status as a way to convince voters he is an outsider bringing a fresh perspective to the party, his close relationship with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes it difficult to see Carney as an outsider or reformer. He is considered the top pick for the party establishment and has been endorsed by many MPs.

Chrystia Freeland broke ranks with the party establishment when she resigned suddenly before Trudeau was about to demote her from the position of finance minister. Freeland has clearly broken away from the top echelons of the party, but she was among them for so long it’s hard to see her as a fresh face. She has now backtracked against the capital gains and carbon taxes she so recently and strongly supported. While politicians can and should be able to change their minds, this about-face may cause voters to think twice.

Former MP Ruby Dhalla has taken an unusual tack in campaigning strongly from the right with a platform focused on the deportation of illegal immigrants and in trying to develop a relationship with the USA rather than taking an adversarial approach in the pending trade war. She has been referred to as “Canada’s female Donald Trump.” While Dhalla has clearly taken a stance distant from the Liberal establishment, she hasn’t endeared herself to the party loyalists.

MPs Karina Gould and Frank Baylis are both in the race but haven’t drawn much attention yet. Gould’s proposal to raise corporate taxes appears to be an attempt to curry favour with the left side of the party. Baylis has yet to detail a platform.

With the prime ministership as the prize—if only for a short period—the stakes in the Liberal leadership race are high. The five contenders must first convince the party they can best represent Liberal values, then they must convince the electorate the Liberal values they represent aren’t the same ones of last year. It remains to be seen if any of them will pull off that two-stage campaign with success.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.